The addition of 15 new partners and a name change from Bastion to Blossom & Credit since 28 June are upbeat signs that this law firm is blooming at the right time.
After China’s first credit legal services team brought 210 legal professionals to join Blossom & Credit from Tiantai Law Firm, a key figure in the revamped brand’s journey shares its future path.
While the massive merger between the credit team and Blossom has concluded, Li’s vision for the newly formed entity has just begun.
“In terms of personnel, I hope it can expand and become a moderately sized firm with 500 lawyers and 20 branches, initially completing a domestic core strategy within three years,” said Li.
The credit team was founded 20 years ago at Tiantai Law Firm with just four members. Over the years, it had grown rapidly to boast a nationwide team of 200-plus legal professionals.
“We decided to leave our original platform due to a fundamental change in our team’s management model as our staff size continued to grow,” said Li Yinwu, a core partner of the credit team.
“This shift in our approach, coupled with our drive to evolve and develop, led us to consider a more suitable platform for our needs.”
Li is the managing partner of the Beijing headquarters of Blossom & Credit and was the main partner of the credit team.
“Given our team’s unique characteristics, could we be stronger or larger if we found more suitable soil to develop?”
This suitable soil was at Blossom & Credit – a firm with two decades of history and a relatively simple organisational structure, which mitigates the challenges of integration when a large team joins, Li said.
Most of the credit team’s clients have now smoothly transitioned to Blossom & Credit, including Schneider Electric, Siemens, BMW, Canon, Panasonic, Johnson Controls and other Fortune 500 companies. The headquarters of the refreshed firm is situated in Beijing, with nine branches in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Tianjin, Zhengzhou, Jinan, Hefei, Nanning, and Haikou. Five more offices are being established in Shenzhen, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Suzhou.
With 15 new partners on board, Blossom & Credit now has 22 partners. Li expects the number of partners to increase to 50 by the end of the year. To enhance the firm’s development and operations, he plans to establish a management committee next year. This committee will comprise qualified young partners with relevant experience and a steadfast commitment to taking on management responsibilities.
To ensure the efficient operation of an expanding team, Li said the firm would adopt an integrated operating model that harnesses its local resources in line with market demands.
“There are now many sizeable firms internally independent between the head office and the branches, even from partner to partner and team to team. This results in a situation where the scale of the firm is merely a numerical overlay without realising the scale effect or economies of scale,” Li said.
“Economies of scale can only be achieved after you have found ways to fully integrate internal resources.”
As the first credit team in China’s legal landscape, the practice will naturally become one of the future priorities within the firm following its integration.
In explaining the use of the word “Credit” in the firm’s name, Li said: “This is traditionally called a debt protection practice, which encompasses contractual disputes, and nearly 80% of such conflicts arise due to bad credit. Our team focuses on dealing with those issues.”
The team implements a three-stage approach, starting with a credit and asset investigation, followed by credit legal risk management training and credit management legal consultation in the middle stage, and ultimately offering credit legal collection services at the end stage. The team helps corporate clients recover capital, shorten their days sales outstanding and hasten cash flow, while also reducing their overdue payments and bad debts.
The firm will also leverage Shenzhen and Shanghai as key locations to bolster financial operations as another core business for the firm.
Li has sensed the growing demand for intellectual property (IP) legal services from domestic companies and believed that the Beijing Stock Exchange nurtures specialised and innovative enterprises, many of which are technology-oriented and hold a significant interest in IP rights.
He expected Blossom & Credit to utilise the firm’s previous capital market experience to strengthen its IP business.
Blossom & Credit will also advise on legal services in areas such as capital markets, M&A, private equity, labour law, wealth management, construction and engineering, enforcement, cross-border trade and foreign-related law.
